Physicists Playing Dice

I was talking with my wife about the Einstein quote, “God does not play dice” and explaining that it sounds, unfortunately, like he is against randomness. Whatever he meant by it, randomness itself is not a problem. But when one plays dice, one usually plays with others. And that is the problem.

It occurred to me that physicists with the quantum formalism’s “collapse of the wave function during a measurement” made themselves partners with God. They claimed that they have a direct line and that when they ask, She throws some dice. And that is the issue. If She throws dice all the time, such as in GRW, then there is no problem. It is the “Ask God nicely and She will do” that bothers us QTWOers.

We want a theory where humans, particularly those with PhDs, are NOT central to the very formulation of the theory. We want a theory in which there is an ontology that gives us, hopefully in an obvious way, the correspondence between model and our experiences. For Bohmian mechanics, that ontology is particles, possibly with some fields. If the theory gives us particles where we see them, then we are happy. While a true theory of correspondence between our experience and the model is lacking, having what I just described would be a wonderful starting place.

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